Initial Reading Recommendations For Studying Existentialist Philosophy

eleven texts providing decent introductions to a messy and complicated movement

I got into a rather brief exchange recently, responding to a writer suggesting that, if you want to study (or even just learn about) Existentialist philosophy, the thinker to start with is Jean-Paul Sartre, and the work to read is his “Existentialism Is A Humanism”, since that text gives you a brief introduction to many important themes of Existentialism. To be sure, that is a popular starting point, but in my view, it’s not an ideal one for a number of reasons, which I provide below.

The writer quite reasonably responded by asking me which alternative works I would propose, and I came up with four or five from the list I’m providing here, suggesting that any of them would work just as well as Sartre’s piece for introducing people with no background at all in philosophy (think Intro to Philosophy students, their first semester in college, having zero previous exposure to philosophy) to some of the key ideas and concerns articulated within that broad, diverse, and complex movement we call “Existentialism.”

Existentialism is where I first cut my proverbial teeth as a college student in the early 1990s. It was the movement of thought I found interesting enough to study on my own outside of my classes, and at least some of the authors said things that resonated with the life I was living at the time. That focus on at least some of the Existentialists continued for me well into graduate school, where I engaged with a number of other movements and approaches in philosophy, eventually writing my dissertation on Maurice Blondel (who has sometimes been, perhaps only in part correctly, aligned with Existentialism).

Over the last several decades, I’ve designed taught many courses on Existentialism to students in a variety of settings, and I’ve taught particular texts by Existentialist thinkers in a number of other courses. I’ve even provided invited lecture series for the general public (you can find a playlist of twelve lectures here). And I’ve applied Existentialist philosophy with individual clients in the course of my philosophical counseling work, often suggesting works to them in bibliotherapy. So you might say that I’ve given a lot of thought to what particular works prove particularly good for introducing interested readers to Existentialism.

Mulling over the exchange I had, I thought that perhaps I ought to put together a less off-the-top-of-my-head, more rigorous and thoughtful set of initial reading suggestions. So that’s what I’m providing below. As it so happens, a lot of these texts are incorporated within the syllabus of the Existentialist Philosophy and Literature class that I teach regularly at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

Why Not Just Sartre’s “Existentialism Is A Humanism”?

Let me clarify one point from the start. I’m not telling anyone not to read, assign, or suggest Jean-Paul Sartre’s short essay “Existentialism Is A Humanism”. I am, however, saying that it is just one of many reasonable entry points to Existentialist philosophy, and should not be given any unique or superlative status over the others.

One main reason for this is the diversity within the field that we call “Existentialism”. It names a complex movement that spans not just philosophy, but also literature, theology, psychology, drama, and various forms of art. Philosophical texts are arguably centrally important to it, granted, but the ways in which Existentialist philosophy is done sprawl across a number of formats, and often intersect with thes other fields just mentioned.

There is, quite frankly, no consensus among the classical 19th-20th century Existentialist writers themselves, let alone among thoughtful and well-informed readers and scholars, on precisely which thinkers are “Existentialists” and which aren’t. Nor is there any consensus one how the movement should be defined (or even whether it can or should be). As a reader, you should be suspicious of anyone who tries to tell you that there is such a consensus, or that they themselves have the one single right view on these matters.

As it happens, after you’re spent a good bit of time with Existentialist texts, you should hopefully find a number of interwoven philosophical themes identifiable as important to Existentialists and present in their works. There’s no definitive listing of these either, though, and different interpreters will emphasize some more than others.

Sartre was arguably attempting to provide a definition of what counts as “Existentialism” in his essay by producing, applying, and explaining the famous formula of “existence precedes essence”. You’ll notice that he names a number of other thinkers who he maintains all buy into that doctrine, and he explicitly calls them “existentialists”, including Gabriel Marcel and Martin Heidegger. Both would criticize Sartre, and both in their own ways would decide to abandon the term to him. His narrow definition of “existentialism” doesn’t correspond to the whole of the much broader movement we call by that name, but only to Sartre’s portion of it.

In my view, it would be a bit irresponsible to simply recommend Sartre’s essay without adding a kind of proviso or qualification to it. It would be something along the lines of: “Sartre is going to tell you that he’s got a lock on what Existentialism is. It’s worth understanding what he thinks about this. But don’t take him as an authority on the totality of Existentialism, since even the very people he names in the essay took issue with him, the essay, and his attempted definition of the term.”

A List Of Suggested First Texts

After giving it a lot of thought, here is a list of fairly short texts that I think would be suitable for introducing interested learners to Existentialist philosophy. Some of these are books, which one might perhaps just read portions of to start. Others are essays, addresses, or even a collection of letters.

I should say that none of these are introductory works in the sense of being easy reads. Each of them are demanding of time, thought, and attention from the reader. And quite likely, the average reader will encounter in them some terminology that is unfamiliar to them. Perhaps there might be references to historical context and events, or to other philosophers and their works, that you don’t grasp right away.

That’s quite all right, and not a sign there’s anything wrong with you as a reader or learner. You just have to keep working at the text, getting from it what you can with each reading. Usually, this works in a cumulative manner, where over time you develop more and more of an understanding for what the text contains.

So here are my, admittedly imperfect, initial reading recommendations. Any one of these could be a good starting point for beginning one’s study of Existentialist philosophy. Not a single one of them, though, is the one sole best starting point. And none of them encompass the entirety (or even half!) of what Existentialist thought has to offer you.

• Søren Kierkegaard, “The Present Age”

• Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground

• Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil

• Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible

• Miguel de Unamumo, Tragic Sense of Life

• Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet

• Martin Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?”

• Gabriel Marcel, “Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery”

• Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism Is A Humanism”

• Simone De Beauvoir, The Ethics Of Ambiguity

• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

You might ask whether it wouldn’t be better to start people off with something a little easier, or at least more of a summary, instead of recommending they jump into primary texts. There are after all encyclopedia entries on Existentialism out there, as well as articles and books purporting to introduce people to the movement. I do think that there are two good reasons for recommending starting learners off with the primary texts. Both of these are reasons that don’t bear solely on Existentialism.

The first of these is one that until you know a bit about the various perspectives that we bundle together under the rubric of Existentialism from actually reading some of the authors and works, you really have little frame of reference to determine which secondary works are accurate, fairly unbiased, and well-informed. Some people emphasize certain thinkers over others as much more central and insightful than others. Some will give you false or insufficient interpretations of some of the thinkers. You don’t really know if someone got Nietzsche right if you haven’t read him at all.

The second is that, it seems to me there’s no good reasons for a learner to delay encountering a thinker’s work in its first-hand actuality. It won’t necessarily be a delight to read any of these suggested texts, but there is a satisfaction that does come with working your way through them and at least understanding part of what a great author is placing in front of you in their prose.

None of that means, of course, that if you’re working your way through one of these texts for the first time (or even for the 20th), that you absolutely must do so entirely on your own, without consulting anyone else who might help you as a guide. If you want to look up terms that are unfamiliar to you, and see what they mean in Kierkegaard or Heidegger or Camus (as opposed to what you’d get from a regular dictionary), nobody is going to stop you.

In fact, since I’ve taught every one of these texts many times, often in online classes, I have developed resources on each of them, sets of lectures available in two formats

in video format in my YouTube channel, for those who want to watch or listen to them

in podcast format in my Sadler’s Lectures podcast, for those who would like to listen to or even download them

I’ll likely follow up this post with some further reading suggestions about Existentialist philosophy. I probably also should provide some reasons for why I selected these eleven works, which I’ll do in a later post as well.

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.